We unfolded the pages with the kind of reverence usually reserved for relics, not for paper that still smelled faintly of her perfume. Her handwriting was steady, almost unnervingly calm. She named what we had only felt: the distance at the dinner table, the silence in their bedroom, the way his apologies never matched his absences. She wrote about bank statements she hadn’t been meant to see, late-night calls that ended when she entered the room, and the quiet humiliation of realizing the life she’d defended was already gone.

But she didn’t ask us to punish him or to choose sides. Instead, she placed a map in our hands: legal protections already signed, accounts moved, a future buffered from his worst impulses. When Robert explained this to our father, no one shouted. The music went on, thinner now, as if the room itself understood. In the months that followed, the wedding photos yellowed faster than they should have, and our family finally stopped performing happiness. Her last gift wasn’t a plea for loyalty; it was permission to stop lying—to him, to each other, and to ourselves.